Tracy Bonham's Best and Brightest

Tracy Bonham doesn’t thank DMX and the Insane Clown Posse in the acknowledgments of her smart new album, blink the brightest, but she does credit them with opening her eyes to reality.

“Lyor Cohen, who was the head of [my then-label] Island Def Jam, took me in a helicopter to Woodstock ’99,” recalls Bonham. “I found myself sitting on the side of the stage for DMX’s show. I looked out over the sea of people, and the energy was so bad there that I started to cry. And then another one of Lyor’s bands, the Insane Clown Posse, played—you can imagine what kind of day I had! It was horrifying, and I’d closed down long before that, but this was the icing on the cake.”

Bonham had come on the scene in the mid ’90s, a wide-open time for modern-rock radio, which latched onto the track “Mother Mother” from her debut, The Burdens of Being Upright, propelling the LP to gold status. But by the time her follow-up, the aptly titled Down Here, came out in 2000, radio playlists had become leaner and far meaner, eschewing female artists altogether in favor of testosterone-fueled rage, even as major labels were being taken over by the suits. “At that point I thought, ‘I’m not in the right place; I’m not even in the right business. Then my mom got breast cancer, September 11 happened, I got a divorce—and all of it made me go inward.”

The artist, now 37, tended to her spiritual and emotional insides until she was ready to make music again. “I decided I wanted to leave something behind that was positive and beautiful, rather than self-absorbed,” she says. Bonham spent her own money to make blink, playing most of the parts herself and working with new SoCal friends like co-producers Greg Collins and Joey Waronker. She found an eager partner for her DIY project in indie label Rounder.

A decade after catching her ?rst wave, Bonham once again ?nds herself in a promising period surrounded by kindred spirits—she cites Inara George, Aqualung, Pinback and Spoon as artists who’ve impressed her recently. “I’m more excited now than I have been in a long, long time,” she says. What better moment to come with what she considers the best work she’s ever done?

“I feel like I set the bar really high for myself,” Bonham says, “which is a great feeling, but it’s really scary.” As problems go, that’s a mighty good one to have.